Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War
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It can hardly be said that the Wrocław train was an accident waiting to happen, because in the previous weeks, a series of transports had passed through Marienthal in little better condition. On December 7 and 8, for example, a party of 1,853 Swallow expellees from Lubań in Silesia, including 459 children, had been ordered by the Polish authorities to assemble at Ujazd near the border town of Zgorzelec for transport to Germany. The train that was to take them there, however, failed to show up until December 11, with the expellees being forced to wait for it in an open field for up to four days and nights. It had rained for much of the time, and upon boarding all were soaked to the skin. The temperature then fell well below the freezing point. Three days later on the morning of the fourteenth, Major Tobin received word that an expellee train was stranded on a siding at Eilsleben in the Soviet zone, lacking an engine. He gave instructions that if it proved to be the missing Zgorzelec transport it should be brought to Marienthal without further delay. By 1700 hours, having heard nothing further, he sent his staff, who had been standing by since 0630, home. Three hours later Tobin was informed that the train was about to enter the British zone. With no staff to hand, Tobin ordered that it be halted at Barmke overnight until the reception center reopened. The train arrived at Marienthal the next morning at 0900 hours, having taken four days to cover the 230 miles from Zgorzelec. One hundred nine of the passengers were frostbitten—the youngest a five-month-old girl—resulting in fifteen emergency amputations. Major Tobin personally inspected two frostbitten babies, who had been healthy at Zgorzelec where their mothers had wrapped them in blankets, “but they had been caught in the rain and on the train journey the moisture in the blankets had turned to ice.” On this occasion too, the Marienthal camp staff had admitted the twelve worst cases to the hospital at nearby Helmstedt and placed the remainder back on the train for another day’s journey to their ultimate destinations, reasoning that an additional twenty-four hours would do the passengers no further harm and that there was no room for more patients at Helmstedt in any event.5 Again, Tobin spoke with some of the expellees on the platform. “Their morale was at the lowest possible point and one man confessed that he had not even the energy to commit suicide.” Nonetheless, because his only options were “to eject them in situ or to return them to the freezing wilderness from which they had come,” Tobin believed that he had “no real alternative but to accept trains once they had been despatched.”6
The suffering of the expellees on the Marienthal transports, which was publicized extensively in the German and British press, gave administrators in London and Lübbecke what they had been long seeking—an opportunity to shut down Operation Swallow for good. The truculent attitude taken by the Polish authorities, which issued an official statement claiming that “records signed by the British liaison teams confirmed the receipt of the transport in good order” and disclaiming “any responsibility whatever for transports” once they had been approved by the British, reinforced them in their determination to do so.7 It would not be correct, though, to conclude that the conscience of the authorities had suddenly been awakened by these ugly scenes. While the privations experienced by expellees traveling from Poland may have been distressing to contemplate, they were no worse than their predecessors in the early spring of 1946 had already undergone. Nor were they worse than what Germans being transferred to the Soviet zone were simultaneously enduring, out of sight of the Western media. On December 16, for example, a expellee train left the Gumieńce assembly camp in Szczecin, bound for Stendal west of Berlin, about 160 miles away. Most of the passengers, after their stay in Polish camps, were emaciated to the point of starvation, covered in lice, and suffering from a variety of infectious diseases. During their five-day ordeal, their misery was exacerbated by third-degree frostbite. By the time the train reached Wriezen just across the German border, eighteen were already dead. Twenty-one more frozen corpses were offloaded when the train finally reached its destination, and a total of 248 seriously ill people were admitted to hospital, most at Stendal, by December 21.8
What had changed by the end of 1946, then, was not the degree of suffering caused to the expellees, but the enthusiasm of British administrators and politicians for a project that was creating an accelerating, open-ended, and ruinously expensive social crisis in their occupation zone, for which taxpayers at home would have to pick up the bill. Ever since the summer of 1946, British Military Government officers had been casting about for a suitable pretext that would enable them to put an end to Operation Swallow. The few dozen deaths that occurred in the Marienthal transports of December 1946—a drop in the ocean compared to the number that had already occurred as a result of the entire expulsion process over the previous eighteen months—finally permitted them to do so.
When the idea of terminating Swallow first began to be seriously discussed in July 1946, officials in the British occupation zone made no bones about the fact that the administrative and financial burdens the expulsions were placing upon them, rather than humanitarian concerns over the fate of the expellees, were uppermost in their minds. From all sides within the zone, alarming reports had been streaming in about the “impossible situation” Military Government officers were confronting in trying to deal with the influx from Poland. As soon as the ACC agreement was signed, the French delegation had warned that by the summer of 1946, expulsions from the three “Potsdam” countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary would require the diversion of eighteen hundred trains a month to the operation. It wondered whether “the use of so considerable a quantity of additional trains is not apt to handicap seriously other essential transport in Germany and even in Europe.”9 The British now found these predictions to be coming true before their eyes. Not only were desperately needed transport resources going to waste in shuttling expellees across international borders, but once arrived in Germany the rolling stock was being tied up for extended periods by dispersal trains having to make “long circuits dropping small numbers of expellees in different Kreise [counties].” The need for these was occasioned by the acute shortage of accommodation—which, ironically, was worsened by the refusal of Polish displaced persons in Germany to go home. Even where houses existed, the inadequacy of water or drainage facilities appropriate to the excessive number of occupants now being accommodated in them was giving rise to the “grave danger” of epidemics.10 Because of the high proportion of sick, abused, or infirm expellees, “all asylums and hospitals in the Zone [were] full to overflowing.”11 Of more than a million expellees that had arrived in 1946 from Poland by official or unofficial means, only seventy-seven thousand were adult men capable of work.12 For their part, the American authorities were experiencing similar difficulties with the simultaneous transfers from Czechoslovakia. As early as April 1946, the U.S. representative in the Manpower Directorate of the ACC officially complained that the Prague government had “refused to allow German miners and other skilled workers to leave Czechoslovakia with the rest of the expelled German population.” By midsummer the problem of the Czechoslovaks sending “exclusively non-productive” expellees to the U.S. zone had become so acute that the Americans demanded that a minimum of one able-bodied person be included in every family group destined for removal.13 These appeals were unanswered. Instead, Colonel John Fye, the U.S. liaison officer for expulsions in Prague, found that “the majority of the Czech field force, the local National Committees, the SNB, the assembly camp commanders and supervisors, simply ignored the numerous directives and strong letters issued by the Czech Expellee Section demanding that the conditions of the Czech-OMGUS agreements be carefully adhered to in the handling of the Sudeten shipments.” Not only were “flagrant violations of the transfer agreement” occurring, but OMG officers had found “deliberate attempts to deceive the American authorities and threats to the expellees by the commissioners of certain districts if they complained while in Czechoslovakia.”14
The idea of calling a halt to Swallow in the summer of 1946 was seriously considered at the
highest levels of the British Government. At the end of July John Hynd, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster whose responsibilities included the British occupation zone in Germany, presented a paper to the Cabinet’s Overseas Reconstruction Committee pointing out that the situation in the British zone was “gradually reaching a condition of over-crowding such as has never been experienced before” in an urban and industrial society. The time, he thought, had “now come when stronger measures should be considered.”15 Although the minister was unaware of it, they already had been. A short time previously, British Military Government officers learned that their counterparts in the United States zone had negotiated a reduced rate of inflow of Sudetendeutsch expellees, from 7,200 to 4,800 daily with effect from July 15.16 Encouraged by this example, British administrators in the occupation zone resolved that it was preferable to ask for forgiveness than permission. On July 26 they imposed a unilateral reduction in the number of expellees accepted from Poland, from 8,000 to 5,000 a day. At the same time, British liaison teams were instructed that “under no circumstances are they to accept for the British zone any expellees from institutions, bedridden inmates, parties of lunatics, orphans etc., non German Jews.”17 When a startled Lieutenant Colonel Ford of CRX queried this instruction, pointing out that it appeared to contravene the Anglo-Polish agreement on population transfers of the previous February, he was sharply told, “Your refusals must be outright, firm and frank. Humanity must not enter into the question.”18 A similar answer was given to Major Boothby at Kaławsk, who was worried that the Kielce pogrom, in which many Holocaust survivors had been shot and beaten to death by Polish civilians and security personnel the previous month, might be the prelude to a nationwide massacre of Polish Jews. Boothby asked for instructions as to what to do if a trainload of Jewish refugees should turn up seeking to flee the country via the expulsion routes. He too was ordered, if that situation arose, “to make every endeavour to stop the train and have it returned to Poland.”19
In light of what seemed a state of near-panic among British administrators in Germany, officials in London ignored the slight to their authority and allowed the cutbacks to stand. But they were unwilling to close down Swallow altogether, in spite of importunate pleas from Military Government personnel to do just that. The Germans from the Recovered Territories, occupation zone administrators argued, could not make “any contribution to their own upkeep or to any reconstruction of Germany by reason of their deplorable physical and economic conditions.” As a result, “we are carrying out a scheme exceptionally disadvantageous to the British Zone and which has now become an intolerable burden.”20 This was the view of some Foreign Office officials also. As Andrew Franklin of the German Department bluntly put it, “the population transferred was largely human wreckage” that would become a permanent burden on the British taxpayer.21 But in spite of these remonstrances on the ground in Germany, the final verdict was that the acceptance of expellees must continue, even if on a much reduced scale. In the first place, the transfer of Germans was “the only point on which all parties in Poland are united,” and Britain would gain instant unpopularity “if we cannot give irrefutable reasons to make clear why we cannot do what we undertook in November last.” In the second place, London was determined that whichever zone wound up being saddled with Yugoslav and other non-Potsdam Volksdeutsche arriving in Austria, it should not be the British. In quadripartite negotiations, Britain had adhered to the principle that it and the Soviet Union should assume responsibility for receiving expellees from northern Europe, while the United States and France should do the same for the south. To renege on these existing commitments might expose Britain to demands to accept a new flood of Germans from the Balkans. Lastly, there were the 166,000 East Prussian Germans still being held in Danish camps, who could no longer go home. London hoped to strike a deal with the USSR, in which these Germans would be taken across the border into the British zone, in exchange for a credit of 166,000 Swallow expellees to be accepted by the Soviets. “Such an arrangement would clearly be of great benefit to us since we should get better fed Germans and we should hope to get Danish help with food and hutments.”22
Nonetheless, though the transfers continued on the reduced scale, the prospect of finally being rid of the obligations of Operation Swallow proved too beguiling to ignore. From this point onward officials in Britain as well as Germany began to cast about for a rationale that would allow them to claim that they had fulfilled their commitment to the Poles and bury Swallow once and for all. One possible argument was that while the British were loyally discharging their obligations, the Soviets were not. From mid-1946, the Foreign Office became increasingly convinced that the Poles and Soviets were conspiring to channel all expellees from the Recovered Territories in the direction of the British zone, industriously cooking the books along the way. Sir Orme Sargent in particular had always been highly suspicious of the Polish population figures. In December 1945 he had said that “Just as we were deceived at Potsdam by the Russians saying that there were only 1 1/2 million Germans left east of the Oder and Neisse, so we shall now, I suspect, find that there are still considerably more than the 3 1/2 million budgeted by the [Allied] Control Commission …”23 His subordinate Robin Hankey, formerly of the Warsaw embassy but now working at Whitehall, arrived at the same conclusion from opposite premises. He was, he announced in July 1946, unable to avoid “a suspicion that we are being deceived over the Berlin agreement. I have never believed there were 3 1/2 million Germans in Poland when it was concluded. I suspect the Soviets are taking none, or only those capable of work.” Five days later, he reiterated his conviction to Con O’Neill that “the Soviets are crooking us over this.” Andrew Franklin was another who believed that Britain had “been taken for a ride on ‘Operation Swallow.’”24 As a result, the Foreign Office began almost obsessively to collect evidence that would tend to show that the Soviet zone had not been taking its fair share. A Radio Warsaw broadcast stating that 900,000 Germans had been removed from the Recovered Territories as of July 17, 1946 was seen as a key admission: inasmuch as 700,000 expellees had already been admitted to the British zone under Operation Swallow, clearly the Soviets had taken much fewer—perhaps even none at all.25 Soviet housing figures were pored over to show that the population density in East Germany was lower than it ought to have been: if two million expellees had indeed arrived there, average dwelling space per person ought to be no more than 6 square meters, rather than the 14.4 square meters the USSR was claiming.26 A chance comment by an officer at the Polish military mission in Berlin to the effect that the Soviets had diverted two trains from Operation Swallow to clear their own territory in the Memelland of Germans was seized upon as evidence of their lack of commitment to the task at hand.27
In truth, there was a good deal of justification for British skepticism about the number of Germans arriving in the Soviet zone. No statistical expertise was required to appreciate that the data of movements supplied by the USSR to CRX, at least for the first half of 1946, were nonsensical on their face. If the Soviets were to be believed, no fewer than 209,000 Germans had been extracted from Poland in the ten days immediately following the signature of the November 1945 ACC agreement—more than the British had succeeded in moving, by rail and sea, during the first two months of Operation Swallow. Another 341,000 supposedly had traveled in December 1945, in the depths of winter. By contrast, the number of expellees allegedly transported by the Soviets in the first half of June 1946 was a mere 938. Altogether, the USSR claimed to have taken 748,373 Germans from the Recovered Territories up to June 15, 1946, a figure duly certified by the Polish CRX representative, Lieutenant Colonel Konarski.28 When challenged as to how these numbers could possibly be accurate, the Soviets and Poles claimed that they included foot traffic between the two countries as well as an alleged “mass migration over the frozen Oder” during the winter of 1945–46—explanations that the British understandably greeted with loud guffaws of incredulity.29
From t
he end of August, consequently, proceedings in the monthly meetings of the four-power directorate responsible for expulsion movements were enlivened by mutual denunciations by the Soviet and British representatives of the veracity of each other’s expulsion figures. The British poured scorn on Soviet assertions that 100,000 expellees from the Recovered Territories had illegally made their way from the British to the Soviet zone. The Soviets dismissed British counterclaims that 188,800 more had traveled in the opposite direction. Each accused the other of clandestinely dumping unwanted Germans across the zonal frontier. According to one report, the Poles had introduced into the British zone some 80,000 expellees not counted in the official tally by running unauthorized trains from Szczecin to Schwerin, northwest of Berlin, depositing the Germans there, and leaving them to find their own way by foot into the British sector of the city.30 In an effort to obtain credible figures and ratchet back the war of words, Brigadier Kenchington proposed the creation of a joint Soviet-British audit office, operating with the assistance of CRX, to conduct inspections of the records of transit camps, dispersal centers, and housing authorities. The Soviets, though, ultimately rejected the proposal, arguing that to abandon the self-reporting system “would constitute an act of mistrust towards the recorded data submitted by the delegations concerned.”31 The British side took this as final confirmation of its belief that the USSR habitually fabricated “entirely unacceptable and unverifiable figures to show that all balances [of expellees] are in their favour.”32